The Entertainer

Ragtime — that bright, toe-tapping piano music that flourished in bars, brothels and parlor rooms in the early 1900s — has found an unlikely promoter and practitioner at UC Irvine: a young civil engineering student named Jared DiBartolomeo.

DiBartolomeo belongs to a generation that worships technology, was raised on rap and is addicted to keyboards — the kind attached to computers and electronic toys. But sit him in front of a piano and, with the first infectious bars of Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag," he can transport listeners back to the days before the phonograph.